The mechanics of warfare: Weapons

Edit: The main weave of conversation follows the outline in my second post and explains the details of 3 main points. If you don't feel up to hacking the walls of text that is just fine. In between those posts there is much conversation so feel free to join in.

Part 1 is the intro and can be found in the next post.

Part 2 is now up, conveniently at the top of page 2. It continues part 2 and introduces our mock battle.

Part 3 is in post #45 on the second page. The battle is heating up nicely.

Part 4 is at the top of page 3. A bit short compared to the rest, introduces new units.

Part 5 is in post #85 on page 4. Gives more detail about the new units, next up is the fight.

So, lets talk about weapon mechanics! This thread is not just for me to ramble on. If you see a discrepancy, feel that I am missing something or just have something to add, speak up! The mission of this thread as stated here is: to help us as players teach each other how realistic weapons function and most importantly, ask each other how realistic we want the weapons to be in our games.

To be perfectly clear this thread is about how weapons work. Later on we can start a master list of each weapon we would like to see and the particulars of each.

With the plans for a modular unit design system in the works its apparent that we as players are going to have a lot of choices to pick from. Its easy to provide the developers with a list of weapons that you would like to see in game. But first you must ask yourself if you really want a gigantic selection of choices, most of which a highly redundant. In a statistical sense does it really matter if the developers include katanas, zwiehanders and kopeshi if all of them just end up as Swords with a varying attack strength?

In a word, yes. All of those might be swords in that they share the features of sharp edge and a handgrip. But each weapon has a unique identity that makes it perform differently in combat. If you take the time to include these differences what you end up with is a much more realistic game with choices that affect your gameplay rather than being simply cosmetic. This is what most people would call adding depth to the game. To do this you do not have to detail every single weapon down to the last inch. Instead you must understand and quantify the mechanics that make each weapon work the way it does in real life and should in a computerized setting. If I arm my soldiers with halberds I want that to mean something. Halberds should not be just another spear with a +2 bonus against horses.

So where did we leave off? Ah yes, you just finished casting a very powerful spell. But thanks to my sense of humor and lazyness the spell description and name were not very helpful. So to get a better idea of what this does you skip the useless spell description and turn to the page that details what the spell does in terms of game mechanics. Unfortunatly due to the aformentioned lazyness I didn't fill this section out either!

The enemy channeler can sense that a huge amount of magic has just been spent. However he doesn't know what the spell does, he certainly doesn't have the spell in his book and its not like we would tell him, he can only observe it in action. Not to be outdone he brings out the big guns and blasts off the rest of his remaining mana in two powerful spells. At the far end of the battlefield a spontaneous whirlwind touches down and bores into the ice like a drill. Large chunks of ice fly up and out of the hole in all directions, shattering to pieces as they land. As the pieces settle, they begin to move. The chunks of ice form up into the rough shape of men and the ice warriors shuffle forwards into ragged ranks. This doesn't take long and when the dust settles there are 1200 newly minted soldiers marching towards you at a slow shuffling pace. Flashing back to our guard for a second reveals bored postures and several games of tic tac toe scratched into the ice, no sweat then.

The larger chunks of ice that didn't break apart start rolling towards the big pit and tumble inside, pushed by gusts of wind. All of a sudden one gigantic olympean sized lightning bolt blasts down into the ice crater like the fist of an angry god. Bits of ice fly out of the pit and flash into steam before your eyes. One of them gets thrown so far that its bounces and rolls to a stop on the foot of one of your guards who flicks it away. As you watch two giant 20 foot tall ice elementals climb out of the steaming pit and slam thier fists together with an intimidating *CRACK*.

--

Things are heating up! Or cooling off as the case may be. With the arrival of those ice juggernaughts things have changed. An enemy of that size can crush one of our guards flat and no amount of training will save them. Having 300 extra lives is handy but they can not be wasted and I would still like to keep the original 7 guards alive if possible. (EDIT: You will learn more about this later) A good start would be to get them some backup.

Digging back through my spellbook you have a look at the summoning section. Instead of conjuring creatures from nothing or bringing them in from another plane of existence, all my summoning spells involve the transport of previously trained troops. One spell catches your eye. Its a spell that creates a two way portal between a battlefield and a prepared portal structure built previously in one of my cities. Troops can retreat through it at no cost, but to pull troops through onto the battlefield takes a lot of effort. We have just enough mana left to form the portal and pull through two random units.

You cast the spell and link the portal to the nearest city which happens to be a seaside fortress. An arch of flames appears behind the honour guard. The flames surrounding the portal flare up and out pops... a bolt thrower? Three of them! They skid to a halt as the guards jump out of the way. The portal flares again and 24 men emerge at a jog, leading with them 3 horse drawn carts packed to the gills with siege bolts. 5 of the men immediately slip and fall, not expecting ice. 3 of the men detach the horses from the carts and lead them back through the portal leaving a 7 man crew for each machine. Your first cast is a lucky one. These men are siege engineers, trained to operate artillery and both destroy and construct fortifications. Given the lack of castles around they are a bit out of thier element so to speak but the bolt throwers will do much to even the odds.

The portal flares again and out walks a pair of gigantic armoured grizzly bears. Walking between them is a tall woman wearing heavily armoured robes and carrying a staff in hand and a crossbow slung across her back. This is Caprice, one of the heroes under the command of my channeler. Caprice is a pyromancer as well as an engineer, the bears are her bodyguards (aptly named Rend and Maul). Not only is she capable of various pyrotechnics but Caprice is also capable of shaping the battlefield with her magic.

--

Taking stock this is what we have on the table. On the enemy side we have a 20 strong unit of elite hammerorc cavalry riding magical wolf mounts with 2 extras, a horde of animated ice warriors numbering at 1200 even, and two giant house flattening ice elementals. On our side of the board we have a 7 man unit of elite swordsmen buffed with a unknown power, 21 siege engineers manning 3 bolt throwers, and a pyro engineer heroine with a pair of ursine bodyguards. The wolf riders are retreating in the face of our bolt throwers and are moving to join with the horde of ice warriors. The horde is still quite a ways distant, advancing at a steady shuffle. The elementals still near the crater are taking slow steady steps forward, each of which shakes the ice and cracks the surface. It seems as if the riders will attack in tandem with the ice warriors while the elementals advance at a slow but unstoppable rate.

Our forces are still in a jumbled group clustered around the fire portal. You have some time to deploy your forces, and now more than ever does the individual strengths of your units become important. This battle could go either way depending on the choices you make.

That would literally scare off prospective readers 4 times harder. And the first post is also the title page that gets displayed no matter which page of the thread you are reading. You are of course right that its getting a bit large. As usual. In the past I tried making "part 2" threads but they never seemed to work as well.

The tale grew in the telling and now the tale needs new pants. Any ideas?

Then again we have already finished talking about how damage is not a number. We are on to simplified complexity which is a related but totally seperate topic. I can probably organize things in a better fashion so I will give that a shot tommorow.

thoroughly enjoyed the read, although i have to admit i was somewhat skeptical at first. First rate job, the forums here are excellent, as are many of the posts. I really hope for a system that goes beyond RPS and, as Tamren has described it, it doesn't have to by labrynthine in exposition in order to produce some seriously mouth watering tactical propositions. As for where to go from here, I'd suggest crystallising what's been said and introduce it again as another post. The more the merrier.

@Tamren - Well if you are worried about scaring off readers due to length then I would question your target audience. If the material is solid, the writing well done and the topic relevant to the community I think people will deal with it.

Yea, people who won't follow it won't follow it. But there is a difference between a post 2 screens long and a post 20 screens long. Even if I can plow through it, if I get the feeling that it's Don Quixote tilting at windmills I don't tend to respond.

A good thing to do at some point is resolve your desired mechanics into appropriately simplified models and then the individual pieces into more concretely terms of xml/c++ psuedocode. Not really for the devs to copy and paste, but it's much easier to guess if an idea is feasible if you can write the algorithm.

Anyway I really like the way you see combat. May I add something? Damage is not a number, it should be a "state" like "fresh, fatigued, exhausted, injured, severly wounded, bleeding" and so on. Even from the core rules. Hit Points have just lived too long. A strategy game should really need something else than those numbers to show the status of a unit.

A good thing to do at some point is resolve your desired mechanics into appropriately simplified models and then the individual pieces into more concretely terms of xml/c++ psuedocode. Not really for the devs to copy and paste, but it's much easier to guess if an idea is feasible if you can write the algorithm.

Thats a great idea. But as much as I wish it were so I don't get paid to do this so the amount of time I can spend on it is probably too limited for detailed mechanical breakdowns. Even then the best I could do for you is algebra or perhaps a flowchart, I don't know any programming languages. Before I start though we have to get far more specific than what we are talking about in this thread.

Hit Points have just lived too long. A strategy game should really need something else than those numbers to show the status of a unit.

Oh hell yes. Hitpoints are something that have been abstracted and dumbed down so much that it becomes an almost meaningless limit break. How come I am just as much alive at 100hp compared to 1 hp? What is the difference between 1 hp and 2hp? It just screams stagnation whenever I see a new game made that relies on the same tired dirt simple system. Its a problem that requires baby steps to solve and I touched on that a bit in my post about mmo tanks.

The difficulty with changing the situation is that any increase in detail just slaps the developer in the face with an exponential increase in effort required. Tracking invididual hitpoints for different parts of the body is a step forward. But I could probably divide the human body into 100 trackable parts with ease and that is a 10000% increase in the data you have to store and calculate.

The difficulty with changing the situation is that any increase in detail just slaps the developer in the face with an exponential increase in effort required. Tracking invididual hitpoints for different parts of the body is a step forward. But I could probably divide the human body into 100 trackable parts with ease and that is a 10000% increase in the data you have to store and calculate.

Then only pick the key components. Seriously, even if you just do it fallout 3 style, it's a huge improvement over monty python's black knight getting to fight at full strength, and that's only 6 zones. I mean sure, you could track the status of the right bicep, but tracking the general musculature of it will be nearly as good and easier for the player to keep track of. In a strategy game with a largish scale where abstractions need to be made in order to not bury the player in detail, I'm absolutely fine with hit points representing a soldier's ability to take damage and how injured they are on a few conditions:

1) factor in health to the damage a guy can do. Honestly, if you're using your spear as a cane, you're not going to be able to put much of any force behind the attack. It's beyond time this got implemented, because it would make archery a much more interesting weapon, because it may not be able to kill many enemies but it can really hurt their fighting capacity by the time battle starts.

2) severe wounds (< ~25%) should slow a unit as they try to keep their wounded moving, and if they rout the wounded should get ditched and disappear from the unit as they can't keep up and either get killed, captured or simply hide and heal rather than stay with their unit.

3) Trashes morale. This really goes without saying.

I can't think of anything else, but with these additions, the level of abstraction is perfectly acceptable to me.

There are some great ideas in this thread. I especially love the idea of visual queues that provide understandable feedback about the units.

You may have noticed that I haven't yet mentioned either morale or hitpoints. The truth is I never had the need to. This mock battle is very "personal" and at no point did the battle involve more than 100 entities. Because of this we can spend a lot more computer time on little details like the limping guard and the loss of cloaks. For example, you could zoom in all the way to the invidual health of each guard in the unit of 7. You would discover that the limping guard has a bad bruise on the side of his knee, the armour deflected the orc hammer and it hurts a lot but its not crippling. At no point in the system are hitpoints or any equivalent mentioned or written.

Morale is much the same way. You have more fingers than soldiers under your command. This means that you can keep a finger on the pulse of each soldier (so to speak). You are watching, and they know it. When you cast that spell they could feel the power you gifted them with. In fact if you paused the game while the guards were taunting and examined the personal reaction of each you would see things like "OH ITS ON NOW!" (and of course, "YOU ARE ALL SO BONED!")

If we scaled up combat and replaced these guards with 100 spearmen, the mechanics would be much different. The detail is there but it must be condensed in various ways because you don't have enough attention to take it all in. While you can still examine the state of health for each and every one of those 100 soldiers, you won't be able to do this on the fly. Instead the health of the unit is measured in how many combat effective troops remain in the unit. This would start at 100/100 but would drop as soldiers get tired or are wounded or killed.

During the battle you would see signs. Soldiers start breathing heavily after a long sprint, soldiers at the back of the unit lean on thier spears for a moment of respite. Two soldiers break formation and drag a wounded soldier off the battlefield to the care of the reserves and later return. Every now and then you will see a soldier laying on the ground, you won't know the status of that soldier unless he is conscious or his fellow soldiers have the time to examine him. In a mobile fight there will be fallen soldiers all over the place.

After the battle you recieve an after action report. This is where the detail comes back in full, no matter how large the scale of combat gets. You would read that out of 100 spearmen, 6 are dead, 3 are missing and presumed incinerated (to fireballs) and 27 are wounded. Of those wounded 23 have minor injuries and will be fit for duty in a week, one has lost a hand and must retire as a soldier (he will later become a barkeep), another died of blood loss after the battle and the last one has a concussion and hasn't woken up yet.

For morale, again you must rely on signs. The standard bearer holds the flag high and fights at the front line when your men are holding strong. The difference between the spearmen and the guard is that the speamen is an organized unit of soldiers complete with a leader. This "sergeant" is responsible for the morale of the men under his command and will attempt to rectify any problems while informing you. "Let us at em!" "My men are about to break!" etc. If this leader is killed then the fog of war rolls in bit more or his second in command takes over.

And Tamren, I'll be happy to resolve some stuff into psuedocode, I'll just need you to look over it and make sure I didn't get it wrong.

Great! But I have to ask, how feasible is all of this as a whole from a programming perspective? I am convinced that all of this is perfectly possible, but even I admit that as long as money is an issue it will probably not be practical for a long time.

I mean sure, you could track the status of the right bicep, but tracking the general musculature of it will be nearly as good and easier for the player to keep track of. In a strategy game with a largish scale where abstractions need to be made in order to not bury the player in detail

I touched on this a bit when I mentioned the scalability of combat. When combat moves to large scales, detail becomes less important but no less relevant. I think we could probably create another thread to discuss the particulars of health alone. Heck, maybe a dozen threads.

Quoting keithLamothe, reply 6A good thing to do at some point is resolve your desired mechanics into appropriately simplified models and then the individual pieces into more concretely terms of xml/c++ psuedocode. Not really for the devs to copy and paste, but it's much easier to guess if an idea is feasible if you can write the algorithm.Thats a great idea. But as much as I wish it were so I don't get paid to do this so the amount of time I can spend on it is probably too limited for detailed mechanical breakdowns. Even then the best I could do for you is algebra or perhaps a flowchart, I don't know any programming languages. Before I start though we have to get far more specific than what we are talking about in this thread.

Quoting vieuxchat, reply 8Hit Points have just lived too long. A strategy game should really need something else than those numbers to show the status of a unit.Oh hell yes. Hitpoints are something that have been abstracted and dumbed down so much that it becomes an almost meaningless limit break. How come I am just as much alive at 100hp compared to 1 hp? What is the difference between 1 hp and 2hp? It just screams stagnation whenever I see a new game made that relies on the same tired dirt simple system. Its a problem that requires baby steps to solve and I touched on that a bit in my post about mmo tanks.

The difficulty with changing the situation is that any increase in detail just slaps the developer in the face with an exponential increase in effort required. Tracking invididual hitpoints for different parts of the body is a step forward. But I could probably divide the human body into 100 trackable parts with ease and that is a 10000% increase in the data you have to store and calculate.

You can replace hit points with certain kind of wounds :

Rêve de dragon - dragon's dream - (a french P&P roleplaying game) had such a system. Each characters could take 5 light injuries, 2 great injuries and 1 severe injury.

If you had 5 light injuries and you got one more, it would automaticaly become a great injury.

Same for great injuries. If you have a severe injury you're KO and you bleed. If you don't receive help you'll soon die. If you recieve another severe injury you automatically die.

How getting injuries?

You first need to hit your opponent.

Then you throw 2D10 + attack bonus - protection defence + bonus like the ennemy is unaware of your attack, or he is on the ground, or he is in coma etc - malus from fatigue to know what kind of damage you've done.

Each light injury will give you 1 point of fatigue. great injury give 2 points of fatigue. (severe injury puts you in the coma)

So if you battle with injuries you'll have a hard time defending and attacking due to th efatigue. But heroes or trained unit could ignore 1 or 2 or 3 forst points of fatigue before applying fatigue malus.

So the first strike become really important because it will lessen the effectiveness of enemy! Being the first to hit become really important.

Heavy armor reduce your defense rating but lessen the probability to get an injury (you get a malus when someone tries to hit you because you're slower, but you get a bonus to the damage roll)

Oh and the player don't absolutely have to know those things in combat. Just the attack/defense/armor ratings and fatigue malus. Sometimes they'll see that soldiers will die in one hit, they don't have to know all the dice thrown.

The only thing I don't like with such a system is that armors are all designed with a two numbers : weight and armor rating. But you can add some rules like shields don't add bonus in armor defense against a flail.

No matter what we do, if it involves a computer game then it will invariably boil down to dice rolling in the background. Numbers pitted against other nmbers with and against dice which represents the random factor. The random factor is what drives the system, without it then your system would not be chaotic and thus, not interesting. Every fighter, no matter how skilled will invariably miss at least some of the time. At the same time even a novice fighter will get lucky or his opponent will make a mistake. DnD handles this with rolls of natural 20 or 1. But most games waaaaay oversimplify the data that drives them, leading to such abominations as "hitpoints" and "armour class". (relatively speaking)

Our system will also work like this. But the numbers within the system will be backed up by detailed quantifiable information and statistics. But if handled right then no matter how complicated things get under the hood, you don't need to see these calculations happen before your eyes. You know how things work and you have access to the same data that drives the computer. So when the result arrives it makes total sense and you have probably estimated the result with great accuracy beforehand.

Your ability to comprehend the information you are given is the measure by which you determine how good a player you are as opposed to how good a savant.

About comp calculation : if you've ever played steel panthers you know roughly your chance of hitting a target. But when you know the algorithm used to calculate it .. It's just a big big one, with lot sof things involved. So I think a complex system, with lots of details can be made.

And the system I described is fairly understandable. A big armor will prevent damge but not getting hit. A light armor will increase your chances of getting hit, but won't really help against damage. the way injuries works doesn't even have to be shown. You just see your soldier "injured" "greatly injured" or in coma.

A huge one. It's not that big a problem to me, I've got a nice hi-res monitor, but it made what you were responding to unclear.

I touched on this a bit when I mentioned the scalability of combat. When combat moves to large scales, detail becomes less important but no less relevant. I think we could probably create another thread to discuss the particulars of health alone. Heck, maybe a dozen threads.

I wish we all had quantum commputers that could keep track of the status of every bicep in the army, but I don't think we can do that now. Also, as scale increases you need to use abstraction to hide the detail, something your example did well, so that's not a problem with me, but eventually you need to start compromising the level of detail. It's the same philosophy behind LOD scaling. We can't get that level of fidelity done quickly enough, so we need to see what we can simplify at the lowest cost to accurately rendering the scene. Plus, for some good but rather unfortunate reasons, there isn't a simulational accuracy setting so you can give your CPU a break and some of the systems SD is trying to make this work on will likely not have all that much oomph.

The key with scaling though is that you don't have to let the amount of numbers overwhelm you. Bigger fights don't mean more numbers, just bigger numbers. All you need to do is pick out the most relevant and condense them together into more simple scores. These scores can then be used in your calculations. Each little bit of data in the background is still being updated and tracked, but the amount of calculations being done at any given moment is reduced. You saw a bit of this in action during part 1. When you look up the attack strength of the guards, it is listed at 100, its a safe bet that 100 is stronger than 90. When we go dig into the equipment inventory of the guard, then you will see more of the numbers that combined to make that 100. The guard unit is only composed of 7 members so the equipment they carry has a huge effect on thier performance in combat.

Realism can also help you in a way by helping to draw the line between what is important and what is relevant. It helps a lot if the position of individual soldiers is tracked ala the Total War games. If they are not then you end up with a simpler system such as the one used by MoM. When a unit of 100 spearmen charges into another unit of 100 spearmen, the computer doesn't have to calculate the "attack rolls" (and thus the armour values, weapon strengths hitpoints etc) of every single soldier at once if it keeps track of the position of each. Only the front line of both groups can actually hit each other and do damage. So the computer drops all other soldiers on the backburner and concentrates on those 40 or so. At this level it still matters if 8 soldiers out of 100 are armed with steel instead of copper, but only if they are involved in the fighting. Because the computer can put more of the calculations on the backburner it can make use of more detail to render a more realistic fight.

While the discussion about realism and how to implement it is very fascinating and a fun read, I would really think it's better to look at combat systems that are abstract and, more importantly, arbitrary.

An easy set of arbitrary rules is a much more learnable system for newbies than any hyper-realism because, first of all, if we went with realism, we would have to ask ourselves what we kind of realism we subscribe to.

Let me explain. Let's say we take the situation of heavy horsemen fighting pikemen. One person looks at the situation having watched the movie Braveheart recently and think naturally, pikes should beat horses every time and cites a couple of factors that would back that up - it's impossible to stop a horse from charging into a pikewall, pikes have the reach to unhorse riders and make them vulnerable, horsemen are large targets. Another person, however, may look at the situation and, having watched the Lord of the Rings movies, concludes the horsemen must win and can *also* cite factors to back that up - the force of the horsemen's charge can disrupt the all-important formation of pikemen, the horsemen can close distance with the pikemen easily and use close quarters weapons against defenseless enemies using unwieldy weapons, and so on.

This only gets more complex when you factor in magic. What are the mechanical advantages of using maces over halberds when fighting a hellhound? What sort of armor should I bring to withstand the fire breath of a dragon?

Of course, tackling any problem from a realism point of view will also cause problems when people just haven't considered the mechanics of warfare and weaponry. Imagine your little sister watching you play this game and saying "hey! This art looks cute! Can I play?". Will your little sister have considered the different kind of impact made by swords and maces? Will she have thought about the different ways bows and crossbows would work in a realistic battle? Probably not.

So the real problem lies not in how intuitive a combat system is. The real problem is in how transparent. Going to the Warcraft 3 example, I would say Blizzard pulled off their combat quite well because all of the information is pretty much revealed to you at any time you please to look. Barring micromanagment, it was actually possible to accurately predict the outcome of a battle if you could make the calculations based off of only data you could see. One simply has to look to know. Compare this to the Total War games where stats are represented by only a handful of abstract values and some values totally unrevealed (*cough extremely high attack rate of peasants in M2TW cough cough*) and you'll see that Warcraft, with its siege damage sabers and piercing boulders actually makes more sense than M2TW.

I believe, in the end, a video game only needs to follow video game logic.

With absolute transparency, you never get the result of a bunch of peasant pikemen slaughtering your elite palace guard with you not knowing exactly how it turned out that way. You will always see that for reason X, the peasants got a +Y bonus over your guard. In this way, the strategy is not about knowledge of in warfare in practice, but about learning and exploiting a system of logic. How is this good? It evens the playing field between you, your little sister, and a military historian and between a dull person playing the game for years and a bright person who just picked it up.

Where do arbitrary rules come in? Transparency in rules naturally comes easier if the rules are more or less arbitrary. By arbitrary, I do I mean everything needs to be crazy and swords are ranged weapons, bows do more damage to walls than catapults, and every time an axeman whistles a tune, you get more money in your treasury?

What I mean is that arbitrary rules help players banish "realistic" logic from their minds and instead, look at the battlefield from the video game logic point of view. When a game's logic attempts to emulate realistic logic and, much worse, encourages players to think in terms of real logic instead of video game logic, bad things happen. When my levy pikemen in Rome: Total War crushes the cream of the Greek army by having slightly longer spears than their Spartan hoplites, this not only breaks my immersion into the realism of the game, but I have trouble even seeing the video game logic of it because the devs, deeming realism is the only thing that counts, chose to hide the values of how effectively I can wield my longer spears advantage.

But more realism than before wouldn't be that bad. It would add a lot to strategoies. And I'm sorry to the poor sister that like the graphics.. but if you make a game with that on mind you'll have a dumbed game

Devs should never assume their buyer are retards or 8. Realism is just a way to raise the tactics available. The war3 system is just too simple for a game like that. It's like the tactical combat system of GalCiv2. The game is a blast, but battles are boring. They're nice when you look at them, but they're totally uninteresting.

And against a dragon's breath it would depend on the kind of breath. Fire? You need armor that let you move fast. Hevay armors should be a nightmare to soldiers. Ice? The contrary. Acid? Nothing but magic could stop that. And why not some in game info llike "events" that would be written like rumors and give you advices? Like in HoMM "I've often heard of the fact that a soldier on fire can prevent furthermore damage by rolling on the ground. Or a magical wet barrier or.. etc..."

Making a game unrealistic is not exactly the same as dumbing it down, only making it easier to learn. Take chess. All the rules of chess are basically arbitrary, transparent (every player is expected to know the rules before playing), and simple, yet we've been playing it for centuries. If you want to see other games with arbitrary, transparent, and simple rules that manage to pull off what I would consider deep strategy, try Battle for Wesnoth (it's free!). Just because a game has simple rules, that does not mean it has only simple tactics.

Now with my little sister explanation, I'm not implying your little sister is dumb, just that she would be unlikely to be interested in medieval weapons and armor and thus less likely to bring to the table any preconceived notions of what weapon should do what. If having those preconceived notions makes you better at the game, this flaws the game by

A. making the game less accessible to people who aren't medieval weapons fans

B. making the game less predictable because different people believe in different realities. The devs might think one thing must absolutely be true and you think another and you go "WTF! That's not even real!" (Try it out. Go to any forum you suspect will have medieval geekery and ask whether longbows can penetrate plate armor or whether a European knight or Japanese samurai should win in a fight)

C. making the game less predictable because computer games are never programmed perfectly. You might see some esoteric rule of real warfare play out in-game and think that must be a bug... or a bug play out in-game and wonder whether that really would happen in realistic war.

On the other hand, rules that are arbitrary, transparent, and simple helps a game by

A. making it equally accessible to everyone (though a smarter person may access it more thoroughly)

B. making the game completely predictable, allowing players to analyze the rules and come up with tactics based on the information the game will actually be using to calculate results.

So no, less realism is not the same as dumbing down a game.

Now, if I were to roughly propose a vision of how weaponry works in this game, it might be thus:

Weapons are loosely categorized into a couple of traits.

Light, medium, and heavy

hand weapons, pole weapons, short missile, long missile

Different weapon materials (iron, mithril, wood, etc)

simple, martial, exotic

All weapons are "designed" at a research phase by picking a set of traits which generates a weapon based on pre-defined templates.

Let's say I pick light, pole, wood, martial. The game would define that as a wooden spear. Exchange martial for simple and it's a sharpened stick. If I want it to change the material to iron, it becomes an iron-tipped stick. Changing the light trait for heavy would give me a scythe, or to medium for an iron spear. Changing the pole weapon trait for hand weapon might give me an iron sword.

For each faction, weapon traits could end up being different, or they have special weapons when using certain sets of traits, like a certain nation might never have access to crossbows (metal + long missile), but can still rely on bows (wood + long missile). Maybe a certain weapon using metal, exotic, and heavy becomes a fearsome faction-specific lajatang while all other factions using the same combination get battleaxes. Another nation might be the only in the game that can choose to have blessed weapons vs. non-blessed weapons.

The soldier himself would have a similar chart of traits

Foot, horse, pegasus ()

No armor, light armor, medium armor, heavy armor

Conscript, regular, elite

unshielded, round shield, tower shield

5, 10, 25, 50, 100

(armor and shields may belong to yet another category)

Again, different combinations of traits get different kinds of units... I don't see how these traits aren't self-explanatory. Also again, different factions might get exclusive traits or bonuses for certain traits acting together. Maybe a barbarian faction has the traits "sane, berserk" or another sort of faction can pick conscript, regular, elite, and then heroic.

Now, every trait mentioned here has its own bonus or penalty, with the exception of faction specific combos that have special traits, too. For weapons, the lighter a weapon is, the less damage it can to do, but the cheaper it is to field. Different role weapons have different bonuses and penalties, like long missiles can shoot farther, but short missiles can shoot faster or be cheaper or hand weapons do bonus damage while polearms always strike first or can strike from a tile away. Units can be customized to your liking, but at all times there are trade-offs involved with every type of weapon and every type of soldier.

I just don't like battle for Wesnoth because it's a game of chess. I just can't stand games without a bit of luck. (Even if I play go ).

Oh, and the spell description of Tamren made me think about a .. spell creator !! Like in Morrowind. You could create a spell and why not it's graphical visualization in game!

You just learned to control ice bolts. Then you create a spell that throw one bolt, several bolts or just use them as trap on the field. For that last one imagine your opponent that says "Where did go those flying shards of ice?". You would need two spells to create such a spell : a "trap spell" that let you place traps. And an ice spell that let you imbue the trap.

And if you learned a "mass effect" spell you could create a "raining shards of ice" also know as "Swinging in the rain".